The constant whining about how divided the country is and how divisive the political campaigns are this year is getting tiresome.

To listen to the Democrats, you would think that George W. Bush is the first Republican candidate they've ever disliked and that this is the first time this nation has faced a close election.

Does anyone remember 1984? Do you recall how much the Democrats hated Ronald Reagan?

If you buy their version of the Reagan presidency, he invented homelessness, eliminated birth control for the poor and personally killed thousands in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. He created AIDS and apartheid and single-handedly broke the back of organized labor. You think the liberals dislike Don Rumsfeld? Just ask them about James Watt!

Don't forget about Reagan's "assault on the poor." No, the left wing of American politics couldn't just disagree with Reagan's economic policies -- he was assaulting the poor.

They still hate him. John Steppling, a playwright and screenwriter living abroad, remembered Reagan at the time of his death by writing that the former president led "illegal wars in Central America that cost hundreds of thousands of lives . . . maybe more, who is to know really (well, maybe ask [former Reagan administration official John] Negroponte), and waged a relentless assault on the poor for his entire public career."

The playwright is so consumed by his hatred that he wrote, "Reagan died about 92 1/2 years too late by my reckoning, and the world would have been a better place had he been bucketed at birth, like a deformed kitten." Wow, it sounds like he needs a little anger-management help!

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times, admits to liking Reagan personally when he covered him before and during Reagan's governorship of California. However, at the time of Reagan's death, Scheer wrote in a column on his legacy, "Yet, looking back at his record, I am appalled that I warmed to the man as much as I did."

According to Scheer, "It also became increasingly clear that although the man wasn't unintelligent, his ability to mingle truth with fantasy was frightening. Reagan allowed AIDS to spread for the same reason he pointedly savaged programs to help the poor: He was genuinely convinced that government programs exacerbated problems -- unless they catered to the needs of the businessmen he had come to revere."

It infuriated the Left that Reagan was an unabashed champion of a strong American military, limited government and a free economy. Such comments as, "Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose," and, "Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other" greatly annoyed his critics.

Revisiting the Reagan-Mondale debates of 1984, the criticisms each man had for the other's policies reminds me of the recent Bush-Kerry debates. Reagan told voters that Walter Mondale did not support military spending when he was in the U.S. Senate, just as Bush reminded voters about John Kerry's consistent Senate votes to increase taxes and against military-defense systems.

In their Oct. 21 debate, Reagan said, "I know he has a commercial out where he's appearing on the deck of the [aircraft carrier USS] Nimitz and watching the F-14s take off. And that's an image of strength -- except that if he had had his way when the Nimitz was being planned, he would have been deep in the water out there, because there wouldn't have been any Nimitz to stand on -- he was against it."

For his part, Mondale, like Kerry criticizing Bush, condemned Reagan's handling of the nation's foreign policy: "In Lebanon, this president exercised American power, all right, but the management of it was such that our Marines were killed, we had to leave in humiliation, the Soviet Union became stronger, terrorists became emboldened. And it was because they did not think through how power should be exercised."

The Democrats love to say Bush is a puppet of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice -- you fill in the blank. In April, Eleanor Clift, a contributing editor for Newsweek, wrote that "nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or, worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush's strings."

This is the same argument the Dems put up in order to discredit Reagan's leadership. In an op-ed in The New York Times in October 1984, columnist James Restonwrote, "The Democrats believe he is merely a front man for a staff of unelected White House officials, inside television producers and outside political manipulators, and that he can and does play with consummate skill the role of the warrior, or the role of peacemaker, or even of the friend of the poor. For Mr. Reagan, the play's the thing, and the sole object is to win."

Apparently, the strategy for the Left is, if you don't like a Republican officeholder, convince the public and the media that he is stupid and controlled by his staff. Wouldn't it be refreshing if they could just take on policies and ideas, instead of trashing the person?

Today's headlines scream about election fraud in the swing states -- as if this is new. There is no doubt in my mind that both parties have lawsuits drafted and ready to file in key states. But are we fooling ourselves into thinking 2000 was the first time the nation was nearly evenly divided between candidates? This year's election looks to be as close as the Kennedy-Nixon race in 1960.

That year, John F. Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon by 113,000 votes out of 68 million cast. The two deciding states were Texas, where Kennedy beat Nixon by 9,000 votes, and Illinois, where he won by 46,000 votes. Reports of election fraud surfaced in both states, but, despite urging by his staff and others, Nixon refused to call for a recount. In his 1962 memoir, "Six Crises," he wrote that he did not challenge the result, because he felt that the nation would be harmed by the notion that "the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box."

In November 2000, former Nixon White House official Pete FlanigantoldJohn H. Taylor, executive director of the Nixon Foundation, "Within a couple days after the election, Nixon emphatically said he would not challenge the results. And he did more than that. He told all of us on the staff to have no part of any challenge, and he sent back donations, all of them unsolicited, which were sent to finance a challenge."

Despite Nixon's unwillingness to challenge the election results in Illinois and Texas, reporters documented voter fraud in both states. Earl Mazo, a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune, went to Illinois to check out stories he was hearing from reporter buddies in Chicago.

"There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted," Mazo told The Washington Post in 2000. "I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house."

Mazo also uncovered fraud in Texas and was planning an investigative series on the episode. However, Nixon found out about it and called Mazo, and later his editors, to squash the story. Again, Nixon believed fueling the fire of what many people thought was a fraudulent election would do more harm than good for the nation.

If only Al Gore had felt the same way. Instead, in November 2000, Gore put the nation through weeks of agony by refusing to accept the reality of a Bush victory and energized the Left to spend the next four years crying about a stolen election. (Nixon later put the nation through agony with the Watergate scandal, but that shouldn't take away from the dignified way he handled the 1960 election shenanigans.)

To be sure, campaigning has gotten nastier in the past few decades. The Left wants to immediately blame talk radio and Fox News. In 1984 there were no national talk-radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh, yet the rhetoric against Reagan was just as hyperbolic as what the liberals now hurl against Bush.

Though it would be nice to return to a day when our political culture -- and our society in general -- was less antagonistic and more genteel, we shouldn't sugarcoat history. Voters have always felt strongly about the candidate of their choice, and this country has survived bitter divisions in the past. The question is, Are we willing to put the negativity behind us after the election is over -- no matter which candidate is the victor?